RE: If people were 100% rational, would the world be better?
July 13, 2021 at 9:49 pm
(This post was last modified: July 13, 2021 at 9:53 pm by The Grand Nudger.)
I want burgers may in fact be the founding assumption of any society, called by a million other names. Flavor out of the way, I feel that I’m not effectively communicating.
I certainly don’t want to get to mired down in arguments about capitalism. I’m thinking more along the lines of something like this. Two equally reasonable people can disagree over climate change and what we should do.
It’s not really anything as trivial as consumerism that got us here. We’d be here if we were full on property communists. If we conserved every resource from the dawn of man till now. The problem we currently face is an inevitability of human development. Had we been more rational we may have advanced, technologically, much more quickly. In that event we run into the wall earlier. Less rational, slower, hit the wall later.
Now, I think that one set of actions is the right thing to do, but that won’t mean that this set of actions would be a logical imperative for everyone. That all rational roads lead to me, effectively. Consumerism, capitalism, whatever-ism… any of these things may at any point be a thing that saves or condemns us. More rational people would simply be more logically forceful and compelling in the pursuit of -any- goal by whatever -ism. It’s quite possible that for some 100% rational person to hear an environmental proposition and pass. It’s entirely possible, even, that the rational response to climate change, is to continue what we’ve been doing regardless, and let the cards fall.
Competing goals may not have exclusive purchase on reason in conflict with each other.
I certainly don’t want to get to mired down in arguments about capitalism. I’m thinking more along the lines of something like this. Two equally reasonable people can disagree over climate change and what we should do.
It’s not really anything as trivial as consumerism that got us here. We’d be here if we were full on property communists. If we conserved every resource from the dawn of man till now. The problem we currently face is an inevitability of human development. Had we been more rational we may have advanced, technologically, much more quickly. In that event we run into the wall earlier. Less rational, slower, hit the wall later.
Now, I think that one set of actions is the right thing to do, but that won’t mean that this set of actions would be a logical imperative for everyone. That all rational roads lead to me, effectively. Consumerism, capitalism, whatever-ism… any of these things may at any point be a thing that saves or condemns us. More rational people would simply be more logically forceful and compelling in the pursuit of -any- goal by whatever -ism. It’s quite possible that for some 100% rational person to hear an environmental proposition and pass. It’s entirely possible, even, that the rational response to climate change, is to continue what we’ve been doing regardless, and let the cards fall.
Competing goals may not have exclusive purchase on reason in conflict with each other.
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